GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Terms used throughout this study reflect an interdisciplinary approach and merit
more thorough discussion than can be provided in footnotes. As used in this discussion,
such broad terms reflect an orientation toward performing arts scholarship in common
usage. This is justified in that the base of discussion is located in the dances; however,
moving between humanities and performance arts usage creates confusion. For that
reason, a glossary of these terms clarifying the way in which they are applied in this
study is appropriate.

Art and Entertainment

Constructed designations of what was art and what was entertainment changed
over the Nineteenth Century, setting the stage for the early Twentieth Century in Europe
and the United States. This topic is admirably discussed in Lawrence Levine’s book,
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. In general, the
term “legitimate” was used at the turn of the century to distinguish “highbrow” stage
presentations based on enobling themes that only high-class audiences could understand.
Legitimate stage presentations included serious stage plays, opera, concert music, and the
ballet and were based on European aesthetics. Ticket prices to these productions were
too high for regular attendance by the lower classes. “High class” artists were presumed
to have spent many years training in the subtleties of their profession under the aegis of
large, state-supported schools and professional companies and in the mentorage of other
renowned artists associated with a specific city. Such artists were almost exclusively
white, Euro-Americans.
“Low class” entertainers on the other hand, could be white or colored and were
presumed to have simply “absorbed” the mechanics of their craft from imitation of others
(despite the fact that effective comic timing requires meticulous training to achieve).
While the artist supposedly dedicated his life to his art in “lawful” association with other
artists, the entertainer was often thought of as a rogue individual; a clever charlatan of no
fixed abode and an opportunist out to cheat the public. “Lowbrow” entertainments
included those that pleased or titillated low-class audiences, such as dime museums, fairs,

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and vaudeville shows charging minimal admittance fees. Lines of division between “art”
and “entertainment” are arbitrary, for there is much entertainment in the opera or ballet,
and a good portion of vaudeville also presented “high class” actors, singers and dancers.

Culture
Culture as discussed here refers to the second definition of the term presented by
Duncan Ivison in his book, Postcolonial Liberalism. Rather than defining boundaries
between what is authentic and inauthentic, or traditional from modern expression, culture
is conceived of as being continually permeable and negotiable. People depend upon a
concerted assemblage of performative, mediatory elements of culture to orient
themselves to interpret experiences through language. Culture in this sense is not a static
monolithic construct, but an on-going process of interpretation made cohesive by general
common consent of its population.

Euro-American
This term provides a convenient shortcut in this study by combining predominant
European cultural attributes such as English, French, and German influences on
American culture. It is an arbitrary designation that should be recognized as linguistic
(English), religious (Christian) and physiological (North European). Although this is
both arbitrary and characteristic of only a portion of the American population past and
present, it is an important distinction in discussions of art and culture. Otherwise,
assumptions in written documents by artists and critics of the time go unrecognized.

Exotic
The term “exotic” is a broad designation of anything outside the norm of common
European experience, of which Orientalism is one type. Exoticism is interpreted in this
study to include not only distant geographic sites, but also references to remote, “ancient”
times (or even in the future, as would be the case for science-fiction narratives)

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ambiguously designated in the frame of fantasy (“a long time ago, in a place far away
. . .”). Both exoticism and Orientalism are Eurocentric constructs of non-European
cultures and therefore exist only within a context of European influence (the United
States).
Even the term “European” is somewhat flexible to include English, French,
German, Italian, Austrian and Scandinavian inheritors of the (Christian) Western Greco-
Roman tradition; excluding inheritors of the Eastern (Christian and Islamic) Greco-
Roman tradition such as; Russia, Turkey, Romania, Poland, Morocco, Egypt, Arabia, etc.
The exception is Spain and its colonies, perhaps due to its ties to North Africa; there is in
this definition of “European” also a physiological distinction between fair-skinned
northerners and dark-skinned “others”, including the Spanish, Gypsies, and
Mediterranean others, such as swarthy Italians. The designation, “American” also means
“European” in this sense, despite a diasporic population of peoples and cultures from all
over the world, including Europe, from the very inception of the United States as a
political entity. A third type of exotica was attached to ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt,
and Rome in part because they could “not speak for themselves” and were therefore
interpreted as a foundation of the essential, pre-industrial European ethos. In the
discussions of both Gnossienne (Chapter Three) and Faune (Chapter Four), greater
attention is given to this kind of exoticism.
Belman’s book, The Exotic in Western Music lists seven characteristics common
to all exotic music in Western arts that are also applicable to exoticism in visual
performances (i. e. dance and theatre). Over the course of time, then, certain features
signaling the exotic in these entertainments became codified. Whenever there was a call
for an exotic element, these features were repeated, with only minor variation, for any
and all non-European characters. Several essays included in the Bellman book describe
in detail specific exotic features in musical and presentational terms. I have summarized
these recurrent features as follows:

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1. Exotic musical motifs were usually played on European musical
instruments with percussion sounds dominating to indicate either a heavy
primitivism or an aggressive mood.

2. Rhythmic patterns in music signifying the exotic were short and repetitive,
as if the exotic character was unable to express itself in a cultured and
sophisticated manner; this was reflected in the dancing.

3. Dancers often played instruments to accompany their dancing. These

might include rattles for Native Americans, tambourines for Gypsies,
sticks for Nautch dancers of India, etc.

4. Vocalizations consisted of short, nonsense, repetitive, and often non-

melodic phrases rather than a linguistically worded, conceptually-complex
expression in song. Sirens, for example, sang in high-pitched voices on
sustained vowel sounds with vague melody and no rhythmic meter,
suggesting a pre-linguistic, seductive condition. Both Native American
savages and South Sea cannibals chanted nonsense syllables in monotone,
as did Chinese sorcerers. Musical instrumentation supported and repeated
these signature elements.

5. Both the dancing and the music were represented as “unlearned”, or

“natural”. This reinforced the misconception that foreign arts require little
or no formal training. At the same time, the training in exotic performing
art is also referred to as esoteric, magical, secret, etc.

6. A single character dressed in an exotic costume stood for, or represented

the generality of an entire culture. This had the effect of denying
individual, clearly focused, and complex personalities. Alternatively,
“flocks” of exotic people were presented as silent attendants on European
princes and princesses. A single male European character could stand up
against, and defeat, whole armies of exotic males, most of whom ran from
a fight.

7. Exotic characters were often (though not always) confined to supporting

roles. When exotic characters were placed in the main role, they were
usually depicted as the tragic victims (usually beautiful young females
from wealthy, aristocratic families in danger of being sold off by their
fathers into an unwanted marriage) of a restrictive society longing to be
free, pleading for a European (male) sanctuary. Their fates were also
usually tragic: Chinese princesses died of love or went mad, Native
American “noble savages” stoically suffered injustice before dying, etc.
These personages often behaved in an irrational, emotional, child-like
manner that denied them individual adult human qualities. The
feminization of exotic characters (male and female) in the arts has been
the topic of much discussion in the literature.

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Humanism
It is the intent of this study to present dance within its cultural context as a
significant contribution to the humanistic project. This project, regardless of time or
place, proposes to frame a concert of ideas about the individual’s position in life; within
family, community, nation, and the cosmos. This frame of concerted ideas gives
meaning and purpose to the existence of the individual. As part of an attempt to expand
traditional academic concepts of which disciplines, values, and texts should be included
in the humanities, this study of dance in culture makes use of the word humanism in its
broadest sense. Although it is not the intent of this investigation to debate the issue of
dance as a language, it is helpful to point out that it is examined as “text” in the sense of
paralleling the communicative intent of a language. The text of a dance, then, can be
analyzed for its gestalt of meanings and references to the individual’s position in life in a
way comparable to examinations of written text for similar characteristics. If the intent
of communication is given as the basis upon which dance is included in a humanistic
discussion, then the limitations and strengths of both expressive gesture and oral/written
language become apparent.
Cross-disciplinary uses of such terms as “humanism”, then, need not be entirely
alien to one another. If indeed; “The first humanists also grasped how this project of
theirs [humanities] was simultaneously opposed to much of medievalism’s basic
assumptions about man’s place in the cosmos” (Fleming), then dance as an avant-garde
expression has a similar relationship with Early Modernism. Certainly the purpose of this
study is to examine the dynamics of how these dances negotiate both the continuum and
disruptions of this era. In this study, the term “humanism” is used in context with
common usage in performance studies, and it is recognized that this is at variance with
other academic definitions of the humanistic tradition. A helpful discussion of this kind
of use is presented in Richard Schechner’s series of essays on the topic in his book, The
End of Humanism: Writings on Performance.

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Modernism and avant-garde
Two main resources consulted for this study offered conflicting definitions of
“Modernism”. Norman Cantor in his book, The American Century: Varieties of Culture
in Modern Times presents Modernism of the first half of the Twentieth Century as a
rebellion against Victorianism; that whatever Victorianism was, Modernism was against
it (43). Cantor marks out these characteristics of Modernism:
1. antihistoricist
2. departure from macrocosmic to microcosmic dimensions
3. preoccupation with self-referentiality
4. fractured and discordant
5. lack of predetermined pattern
6. rejection of philosophical idealism
7. functionalism
8. rejection of absolute polarities
9. elitist
10. open sexuality
11. aware of the consequences of technology
12. moral relativism
13. the arts as an ideal state
14. cultural despair
However, this convenient depiction of Modernism as an abrupt break from
Victorianism does not accurately accommodate cultural and artistic trends discussed in
this study. Even the avant-garde aspect of Modernism, which fashioned itself in
rebellion against established order retained much in common with Victorianism, and the
concern for social improvement, or the idealization of women and children expressed in
Romanticism is also familiar in Victorian expressions (Chapter One). All these cultural
movements had their own arenas of “moral relativism, cultural despair, elitism, and
functionalism”.
The term “Modernism” can be approached in several different ways. In a broadly
generalized historic sense, the Western tradition can be separated into two halves
between the Ancient and the Modern World. Some historians place this separation in the

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Renaissance, at about the time a change of perception in humanity’s position in the
cosmos took place. In an effort to restore the position of rational investigation attributed
to Ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance goal was, according to Micheleti, “The
discovery by man of himself and the world”. Put another way, the Renaissance
encouraged, “. . .an interdependent system based on individual effort enhanced by
mercantile enterprise and military inventiveness” (Atchity: Preface to The Renaissance
Reader, xviii).
This idea suggests that the modern person is distinctive as one aware of self; the
measure and maker (homo faber) of systems for cooperative functioning. The modern
person is also the player of the game (homo ludens), suggesting an awareness of mutable
social roles and identities, each one layered over another. In the context of Modernism,
this Renaissance pairing of “self as maker” and “self as player of the game” suggests an
awareness of the mechanisms by which social and cultural systems are created and re-
created to ensure continuity and survival. And in the process of negotiating these shifts,
the individual person finds that meaning in aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual arenas depends
upon either an agreed-upon community or personal construct, both of which are
interpretive, and interdependent. Projects in which these dynamics are in question are
humanistic endeavors, whether in the form of philosophical inquiry, the struggle to
establish beneficial political and legal systems, or expressed in the arts.
During this period of nascent modernism, then, a crisis of identity arose when the
individual found him- or herself in conflict with roles created by social obligation.
Whereas prior to the Renaissance no option to question the rule of authority was
available, the possibility of reversing the dictates of a hieratical system arose as a result
of a rebirth of humanistic investigation. As will be discussed, it is in the tensions arising
from the anxieties of self-doubt and defiance (in a multitude of variations) of established
order that the avant-garde impetus is directly identified.
To employ a comparable framework, the philosophical and sociological shifts into
Modernism also can be said to have converged with art near the end of the Age of the
Enlightenment (approximately on-going during the 1700’s) and the commencement of
Romanticism (approx: 1770-1830). This convergence was considered in the
epistemological examinations of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Hegel (1770-

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1831). Over the course of his explanation of these German philosophers and the way in
which their discourses on the nature of aesthetics suggested avenues of experimentation
in art, Arthur Dantoii states that:
This exaltation of art marks a distinction between these thinkers [Kant and
Hegel] and their predecessors of the seventeenth century, who found scant
occasion to write about art. . .in any special, self-conscious way (“A
Century of Self-Analysis: Philosophy in Search of an Identity”. From:
The Age of Modernism: 13-27).

Kant proposed that art had potential as an individually-interpretive activity situated

between intellectual and moral judgment as a corrective to the limitations of pure
reasoning. Hegel stressed the concept of accord, or unity of purpose among art, religion
and philosophy (Der absolute Geist). In Hegel’s discussion, these pursuits collectively
indicated a pattern of self-examination and reflection leading to spiritual transformationiii.
In this study, the avant-garde movement within the broad period of Modernism is
focused on as in defiance of middle-class precepts that are both modern and Victorian.
At the same time, the avant-garde, like Romanticism, requires the presence of that
against which it rebels in order to continue to exist. The term avant-garde means at the
front of a military advance; the part that leads the way and is the first to get hit by the
opposition. Avant-garde artists succeeded by failing; that is, they deemed the degree to
which their art was opposed by the status quo (i. e. the bourgeoisie), as an indication of
how successful their art was. As with most terms used in this study, the term avant-garde
is used in its broadest sense. Richard Schechner’s assembly of essays, The End of
Humanism, presents two kinds of avant-garde. The first is an historical avant-garde that
is charted through its examples in art and a philosophical basis for that art; the many “-
isms”, some of which are discussed in Chapter One. However, the second kind of avant-
garde is also important to this study:
[an]. . . “experimental” performance: whatever is happening at the
boundaries, in advance of the mainstream. Of course, sometimes these
two kinds of avant-gardes are expressed in the same movement
(Schechner: 16-7).

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While the movements of avant-garde artists in Europe influenced the approach the dance
artists in Russia (Nijinsky) and the United States (St. Denis and Shawn) took in their
dances, the artists and their creations are discussed in the framework of this latter sense of
the avant-garde. Arts and entertainments, along with patterns of marketing, are
discussed as avant-garde expressions in Chapter Five.
In this sense, Modernism and avant-garde is taken here as an attitude in which
certain kinds of experimentations with the above cited characteristics were ongoing, and
of which those collected around the avant-garde represent the more radical, progressive
and experimental. For this reason, this study relies more upon the model presented in
Hilton Kramer’s The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972 and
Joachimides and Rosental’s The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century as useful in
discussing the dances.
It is from a close reading of these art history books that the five avant-garde
attributes of Modernism (exoticism, distortions of time and space, naturalism,
spiritualism, and response to technology) are taken. For the purposes of discussing
performing arts, it is more accurate to say that Modernism supported both a continuation
of Victorianism and the radical experimentation of the avant-garde in an antagonistic and
mutually-preserving relationship. This reading of the term is consistent with the
humanities survey textbook by DeWitt and Platt, The Western Humanities.

Modular Organization
Modular organization and construction appear with remarkable consistency
regardless of medium in all instances of public display and marketing of goods and
services. As discussed particularly in Chapter Five, modular construction patterns made
it possible to market and distribute performing arts and entertainments in the same
context as concrete products in a mass market configuration; the same principles apply to
the construction of a skyscraper as to the construction of artworks, including dance.
Elements of basic modularization as discussed by Bradd Shore (Culture in Mind, 151) are
as follows:

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 1. Modular construction employs a series of interlocking (or inter-related) units
organized to construct a more complex entity.

2. Variations among the constructing units and multiple combinations of those

units produce entities that appear to be different; a quantitative rather than
qualitative multiplicity is produced.

3. Constant experimentation in devising configurations is encouraged; individual

variation of expression lies within the limited parameters of a modular system.

4. The consumer’s attention is directed to surface features because modular

systems have no intrinsic interior.

5. Modular systems promote an egalitarian bias because any one configuration is

equal to any other; these configurations as well as the units comprising them
are interchangeable.

Naturalism
Of all the terms used in this study, “naturalism” has proved the most problematic.
The way this term is used in this investigation is confusing because the three dances
under examination appear highly stylized and presentational in their movements, yet they
are claimed to be “natural and therefore true”. However, there are two ways in which
naturalism is expressed in them. One is that all three dances incorporate pedestrian (i. e.
non-dance) movements such as kneeling, walking, running, and swaying. These
movements are performed in such a way that anyone might duplicate them without
specialized training. Although the stage pictures of Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense are
carefully contrived, there are no spectacular balletic leaps, extensions, or spins.
Naturalism is also expressed in the costumes, which permit freedom of movement in the

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dancing body. While the Incense worshipper and Gnossienne’s priest are barefoot, the
Faun wears soft-soled sandals.
The term “natural” attaches to these dances because they are performed in a non-
ballet, non-socially-coded fashion. During the time period in question, ballet, opera, and
social class performances in public were considered “artificial”, or “contrived” in a
European context. In the United States, that European context had previously (before
1900) provided the model upon which American arts and social graces had been based.
However, by 1900 that European model had provided the means by which the upper
classes separated (“purified”) themselves from the lower classes, rendering European arts
and artists—as well as those Americans who emulated them—to be viewed as “alien” to
American values in other classes.
The fusion between artistic performance and public social performance occurred
at this time to create a dichotomous opposition between what was considered “American”
versus “non-American” (everybody else). This polarized perception was particularly
acute in the performance of masculinity in the US and was directly related to issues of
political dominance at home and abroad. If the European male was slight, effeminate,
probably bi- or homosexual, artistic, scholarly, and decadently sophisticated in the social
graces (particularly dancing), he was in all ways “unauthentic”, “contrived” and
“artificial” therefore not true and natural.
Directly opposite then, the American male must be rough, robust, uneducated, a
laborer, masculine, and heterosexual. A “true” or “authentic” American male spent his
time (or at least acted and looked as if he did) outdoors, free of an “unnatural” urban
environment. Feminine artistic activities—particularly dancing—were “alien” activities
to the American male. To be male was to be “not-female”. The American man
(associated with an uncultured, outdoors self-sufficiency) performed a “natural” self,
created out of a worldly sophistication. Females (associated with a cultured indoors,
urban dependency), and males of all other nationalities performed an “artificial” self
associated with the arts and “book learning”.
The other sense in which “naturalism” acts upon the dances in this study is that
since social performance of the self is artificial, a ritualized performance of the artist in
these dances—because it is not the norm; because it is exotic, alien, etc.—is intimate and

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unobserved and therefore “true”. This is in the sense of Delsarte the idea that the
movements of these dances are stylized and ritualized in a highly presentational form that
they convey a reality of the inner self of the person/persona/character that ordinary
pedestrian movements could not. Socially-performed mannerisms—considered artificial,
and therefore “false” (particularly for women) were intended to obscure true feelings, not
reveal them. Arrested action, or pose in a theatrical performance was not normal
everyday life. Presented in an exotic context, such pose reflected not illusion, but the
supposed natural and non-artificial simplicity of Greek classicism in its “pure,
unadulterated” form. Exotic references to Greek arts embedded in all three dances
(although “Indian”, the costume of Incense invokes Greek robes) are discussed at length
in their respective chapters. Resources exploring these dynamics in greater detail are
Brewster and Jacob’s book, Theatre to Cinema (which explains the relationship of posed
images from live stage to film via Delsartism) and Michael Kimmel in his book,
Manhood in America.

Orientalism
The term “Oriental” is a broad designation based upon European concepts of non-
European Eastern cultures subject to imperialistic rule in contemporary and ancient
images. These include a more or less generalized exotica in the Near East; Turkish,
Arabian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Persian, etc. Far East Orientalism included; Chinese,
Japanese, “Siamese” (Thai) and Moslem/Hindu Indian sources.
The very word “Oriental” is a western construct broadly encompassing perceived
and interchangeable characteristics of these cultures; one particularly useful in discussing
The Incense (Chapter Two). Although Russia and Spain also had exotic associations,
they did not fall under the same kinds of generalizations as Orientalism. Since
Orientalism has deep associations with Imperialism (Said), the ways in which various
cultures are exoticized are determined by their subject status to western nations (i. e. as
India was subject to Great Britain from 1857 to 1948, although British economic trade
and cultural domination had begun many years earlier). The amalgam of these subject
cultures in European depictive and performing arts suggested a feminized, lush wealth
and sensuous freedom that flattered the European male gaze. Russian, Spanish (Gypsy),

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Native American and African imagery presented a slightly different context of exotica
because these did not come under direct European rule. The term “oriental” is a broad
designation based upon European concepts of non-European Eastern cultures subject to
imperialistic rule in contemporary and ancient images. These include a more or less
generalized exotica in the Near East; Turkish, Arabian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Persian, etc.
Far East sources of Orientalism included; Chinese, Japanese, “Siamese” (Thai) and
Moslem/Hindu Indian. A third type of exotica was attached to ancient cultures of
Greece, Egypt, and Rome in part because they could not “speak for themselves” and were
therefore interpreted as a foundation of the essential, pre-industrial European ethos. In
the discussion of both Gnossienne (Chapter Three) and Faune (Chapter Four), greater
attention is given to this type of exoticism.

Progressivism
This term describes an attitude rather than a cohesive movement in the United
States as a cultural response to urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The
belief was that, given abuses and inequalities in society, government must first “purify”
itself through reform and then act to protect its weakest members; children (abolition of
child labor) and women (elimination of sweatshops and prostitution). Other points of
Progressivism were prohibition, the “Americanization” of immigrants, and restriction of
immigration.
Progressivism was not entirely consistent. Supported by small business,
professionals, and middle-class urban reformers, the approach did not challenge
capitalism directly; it simply maintained that the most rich and powerful had a moral
responsibility to administer to the most poor and weak. In this sense, Progressivism was
paternalistic and moderate and at the same time supported women’s suffrage. As a
particular approach to social and economic reform Progressivism appeared in the latter
part of the Nineteenth Century and faded during the First World War. But some of its
effects on foreign policy in the United States continue in the attitude that it is the
responsibility of the most powerful nation to guide the less fortunate to a better life.

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Romanticism
The movement of Romanticism is closely connected with Symbolism in the
perspective of this study because they precede the specific avant-garde attributes under
discussion. Romanticism offered a corrective measure to rational thought and scientific
progressivism characteristic of the previous Age of Enlightenment. The creative (poet)
artist as “a man of feeling” was extolled for his visionary genius with access to
fundamental reality and the capacity to inspire mankind toward improvement. The
movement promoted individual initiative, nationalism, imagination, free expression of
feeling, communion (or striving against) with nature, and idealization of women,
children, and non-European groups. Pastoral nostalgia for a figuratively glorious past
took precedence over the decadence and ugliness of industrialized urbanization.
According to The Dictionary of the Arts, Romanticism is defined as:
. . .a style that emphasizes the imagination, emotions, and creativity of the
individual artist. . .asserting emotion and intuition over rationalism . . . in
reaction against 18th century classicism and rationality (447).

Since human beings clearly would not always abide by logic and the dictates of rational
behavior alone, let alone achieve rational integrity, Romanticism sought to subsume the
rational into a balanced relationship with the irrational in an effort to discover the “true
and essential self” from which right action would be directedivand nostalgically bring
about a return to a former, more innocent and therefore uncorrupted social state. And in
this directive the man of feeling; of passion and poetic vision, was to lead the wayv.
The Romantic rebellion against neoclassicism through personal aesthetics, and an
expression of transcendent reality was overcome by the 1870s by Symbolism. As
discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four, Symbolism sought to capture the ephemeral
experience of life. Symbolists (such as the poet Mallarmé) turned toward a more
internalized, spiritual expression centered in the private thoughts of the individual, as
opposed to a more geographic, political, or external expression in Romanticism.
While Romanticism offered a broad, idealistic vision of utopia for mankind by the
benevolent hand of the artist, the closely-related movement of Symbolism appeared late
in the Nineteenth Century as a dialogue between poetry and painting. But Symbolism
also had the effect of defining the general rebellion of Romanticism into a perpetually

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volatile condition of spiritual self-validation. It is this condition of regenerating
opposition to the status quo that made it possible for the avant-garde to remain
innovative, shocking and “new” while continuing to sustain the illusion that the avant-
garde was always about to be eliminated by a larger, more powerful middle-class
mercantilism (Kramer: 3-5). This model emphasizes the Romantic notion that the
individual artist of vision is always about to be destroyed (along with everything else of
true, spiritual value) by the crass stupidities of the middle-class. Hisvi only recourse was
to strategies of subversion, and he fought a heroic, losing battle.
Symbolists internalized that battle. Their preoccupation with experiential
transformation as gateway to spiritual revelation suggests a psychological reaction to
scientific and technological advances such as the theories of Darwin and Freud which did
not complicate the earlier Romantics. As the inroads of scientific discovery
progressively brought to rational light elements of human existence formerly shrouded in
mystery, the “unknown-unknowable” continued to retreat beyond those borders. Some of
those borders were to be found on the symbolic grounds of internal expression and
meaning. In other words, the more rational knowledge about the nature of existence was
sought, the more essential it became to maintain a realm of experience that could not be
encompassed by that knowledge. By way of answering this profound need for mystery in
the human psyche, the Symbolists turned inward as the external realms of Romanticism’s
sublime nature retreated. Instead of exploring geographic frontiers, Symbolists were
engaged in, “. . .seeking to express moods and psychological states. . .Their [Symbolist]
subjects were often mythological, mystical, or fantastic”(The Dictionary of the Arts:
500).

i
The French historian Jules Michelet , who was the first to use the term “Renaissance” in the mid-
nineteenth century is quoted in the preface of Kenneth Atchity’s The Renaissance Reader (HarperPerennial,
1996).
ii
Danto claims Kant as “the first real modernist” because he was the first philosopher to bring into
examination the mechanisms of criticism as a legitimate study (13).

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iii
It is precisely this impetus of unity among elements of performance that was the goal of the German
composer Wagner, and is a mark of spiritualism in the dances which suggests “fundamental truth, beauty,
and universality”
iv
It is interesting that this “core, essential self” constituting the individual free of outer societal corruptions
was identified as the daemon, or part-animal, part-human (Id for Freud) being which must be tapped in
order to discern the “truth” of the human condition. In other words, the human is once again placed in “the
center of the universe” as the unchanging source from which apparently-immutable but ultimately
humanly-constructed institutions of society arise.
v
The English Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, wrote passionately for the poet to become the legislator of a
new world order.
vi
The arcitypal Romantic poet was male; the same principles of romanticism in early experimental dance
was conveyed by women.

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